Selasa, 09 November 2010

Sociolinguistics: The Study of Societies" Languages" is an introductory book designed to help students understand the study of language in relation with the societies. As the researchers say that English is claiming more and more societies of speakers around the world to become the first truly global language in history, read in this book how English is actually controlling our tongues. To name a few, let"s say, why we use"hand phone" instead of "telepon genggam", "software" instead of "perangkat lunak", "e-mail" better than "pos-elektronik" also "reality show", "laptop", "nge-date", "chatting, "hepi", "hape", "boring", and even "SMSin aja"? But we, Indonesians, are not alone. In Malaysia people already have "beg" (bag) and "saiz" (size), in Russia they have the word "seksapil" for "sex appeal", in Japan they change "sunglasses" to be "sangurasu" , "stop" to be "sutoppu", and Arabic speakers take the English word "toilet" and say "al-tualit". What is it? Sociolinguistics defines the phenomenon as word-borrowings (loanwords), a formal outcome of language contact. But language contact is not all. In the field, there are also language functions, language varieties, language attitudes, language changes, and language plans. All are interesting to study and presented in this book. Also in this book readers can find (1) key concepts in the study (speech-community, acrolect, diglossia, code-crossing, interference, jargons, slang, etc), (2) a brief introduction to some most important sociolinguists (William Labov, Dell H Hymes, Joshua A Fishman, etc.), (3) statistics on languages (English, Indonesian, Chinese, pidgins, and some other languages), as well as (4) selected quotations related to the topics taken from various authors of books on sociolinguistcs